


where lemons grow

by ceraunos



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Drug Use, First Time, M/M, Organized Crime, POV Alternating, Pre-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, leonardo (surname-less) wonders what is happening to his life, primo nizzuto learns things and does crimes, that seems like an unnecessary tag given the source material but just incase
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:47:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29437032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceraunos/pseuds/ceraunos
Summary: Primo tastes like cigarettes and brandy when he kisses Leonardo, a hard determined thing that exists in the same second it dies. It isn’t so much a revelation as a slow unfolding of something Leonardo has always, vaguely, known.‘Get out of here,’ Leonardo wants to say. ‘If anyone could, you can.’Instead, he holds out a pack of crumpled cigarettes, old and a little damp, and Primo rolls his eyes but leans in close to catch the light.
Relationships: Leonardo/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 26
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> what is narrative but an inconvinence, anyway?  
> i can't promise coherency but i can promise primo, bad decisions, and the occassional crisis (whether from your author or the characters we have yet to discover)
> 
> NB: it has been brought to my attention not everyone googles the supporting cast members the instant they finish the show, so pls know that **stefano is fifty** x

> _They are beings condemned to live forever in front of each other, both constant and inexorable. – Scylla and Charybdis_

**Calabria, 1946.**

He finds the younger boy crouching over a baby bird and for a second that swoops acridly through his stomach he looks like a gutter cat toying with its prey. He is almost hidden in the almost dark, disappearing seamlessly into the shadows. Leonardo doesn’t imagine anyone is looking for him yet, but still, there are creatures that will come down off the mountains soon to lurk at the edges of the town for scraps.

Leonardo tests the weight of his knife – a recent birthday present, unused – in his pocket, the blade sharp against the pad of his thumb. Primo doesn’t look up at him, even when he coughs. The bird’s wing is half off, broken sharply with splintered bone sticking out. He is, Leonardo realises, trying to twist it back on; the bird not yet dead, but almost.

‘It fell out,’ he says, and sure enough there’s the scattered remains of a nest under a nearby tree.

Primo’s knees are bruised and his hair is tangled with mud and twigs. There’s a slingshot abandoned on the ground, too. Leonardo carefully doesn’t think about how the bird might have fallen, the same way he doesn’t think about how the bread on their table gets there, sometimes.

‘We should kill it,’ he says, his hand coming to rest between the boy’s shoulder blades lightly and still enough for him to startle and twitch beneath the touch.

‘It would be a mercy. It’ll only die slower, otherwise.’

Primo doesn’t blink when Leonardo takes his hand away and twists two fingers around the tiny throat until he hears it snap. He doesn’t speak to Leonardo all the way home either, though.

Leonardo leaves him in the piazza, the evening air already clouded with stale smoke and cheap whiskey from the men gathering in the square. They don’t look over when Primo catches Leonardo’s wrist as he starts to leave.

‘I only wanted a look,’ he whispers, blinking slowly, just once.

**Part 1. Rome, 1958.**

Later, he’ll remember the evening breeze, callous and stinging at his eyes, and the faint trace of his Nonna’s perfume still clinging to the leather seats as he’d pushed down on the acceleration just a little more, even as he’d felt the steering go light.

Primo waits almost an hour somewhere not far from Rome as the rusting car smokes where it’s crumpled into a pylon. There’s a streak of blood, tacky and almost dry at the edge of his temple and glass in his palm, which he idly picks out until Stefano finally appears, looking more like he’s pushing his scooter than riding it.

Stefano doesn’t say anything at first, only takes a long look at the wreck of what was once his uncle’s car and sighs. Once, as children, the two of them laid in the back of that car, hidden under an old wool blanket for what had seemed like days, watching the moon rise behind a mountain. Stefano had fallen asleep on his shoulder, and when the men had returned there had been blood on Primo’s father’s palms.

‘Cazzo, Primo,’ Stefano sighs eventually, handing Primo the helmet he’d tied to the bike with a piece of string. ‘Are you hurt?’

Primo rolls his eyes. A cloud of chemical hairspray clings to the helmet and there’s a smear of pink lipstick on the outside. Primo raises his eyebrows.

‘That’s new,’ he smirks, just to watch Stefano flush.

\--

Her hair is wet and as she leans over Primo’s shoulder to reach into the cupboard above the bathroom sink a bead of water drips onto Primo’s neck. The bathroom is damp with cooling steam and smells vaguely of strawberry and cigarettes; for a moment Primo is reminded of a sink half filled with boiled water, grass stains on his knees, the cotton of his mother’s dress dripping against the draining board. It’s gone almost as soon as he thinks it, drifting back to a realm of dreams.

She – Stefano’s girlfriend – presses a cloth to the blood crusted on his scalp and it crawls through Primo’s skin like lice.

‘Shouldn’t you go to hospital?’ she says, accent soft like song, when Primo twists away from her touch.

He looks at her for a long moment, then swallows the half glass of brandy Stefano had given _‘for the shock’_ , as if that had anything to do with anything. It sits warm and loose in his throat.

‘He hasn’t told you much,’ he asks, without making it a question.

Outside the bathroom door Stefano coughs, warningly. Tendrils of red swirl around the plug as she squeezes the cloth out.

‘You know,’ Primo murmurs with syrupy sweet charm, ‘he hasn’t even told me your name.’

\--

She kisses him in the dark between Stefano’s snores and it tastes like brandy and blood and strawberry and cigarettes and feels like nothing at all.

\--

He slips out of the door before dawn and in the pale light, yellow and drawn under streetlights, he wonders if he should feel different, somehow. Later, he’ll offhandedly mention, in a way that could mean nothing at all, just a slip of the tongue to the wrong person, a Sicilian in Rome. He will only ever mean for her to disappear.

There’s a man painted silver standing under a streetlight smoking and Primo doesn’t have any money but he holds the cigarette out before Primo has to ask. The nicotine tastes cheap and there’s another man’s spit on his lips as he takes a drag, the itch in his palms spreading loose and elastic through him.

Stefano and his girlfriend are already gone when Primo breaks back into the flat, a hazy cornflower blue breaking at the edges of the sky. He doesn’t remember twisting the sheets around him before he passes out.

\--

He’s woken from a hazy, concussed sleep by a hand on his forehead brushing away the hair plastered there with old sweat. Someone is saying his name and he doesn’t even have to think to know who.

‘Primo,’ Leonardo says again, and his thumb brushes at the gash on his temple. It’s solid and calloused in a way that makes Primo’s skin crawl. 

Daylight explodes like shards of glass, nausea tipping over him in a cold rush as he groans, high and childlike, before he can bite the sound back in his throat. His tongue is sticky and bitter with the brandy still clinging there. It tastes faintly of blood, too.

Blindly he pushes Leonardo’s hand away, already shutting his eyes again so tight coloured spots bloom and dance behind his eyelids. ‘ _Vaffanculo_ ,’ he grinds out between his teeth.

Instead of leaving, Leonardo just says his name again, quieter than Primo has ever heard him speak and sharp as flint. Eventually a glass of water is pressed into Primo’s hand and behind his eyes the shadows shift as Leonardo paces.

‘What did you do to the car?’ he asks after a long moment with a voice that doesn’t sound like he’s asking, so much despairing in the way of his that makes Primo’s teeth sting. 

‘There’s nothing _in it,_ is there?’ Leonardo says, when Primo doesn’t answer, like Salvatore would trust him with anything nearly serious enough to be left in it at all. 

_‘Leave no trace,’_ Primo’s father had said, once, picking bullets out of the ground as they’d wound their way across a mountain path half washed away by spring rain. Primo’s palms had been wet with the blood of a neighbour’s lamb, gun smoke still trailing around them.

_Leave no trace._

‘I’ll deal with it,’ Primo sighs, and doesn’t flinch at the rawness of the sound against the back of his throat. When he opens his eyes again it’s to the hard line of Leonardo’s shoulders turned away from him. ‘You can go.’

Leonardo seems to collapse like a marionette Primo has snapped the strings of, and Primo thinks _of course that’s why you came_ and swallows the untethered bitterness that swells, traitorous, behind his teeth. 

‘I brought you a clean shirt.’

‘No one asked you to,’ Primo spits without particular intention.

‘Still,’ he says, frowning as if it’s obvious and Primo’s fingers twitch involuntarily.

It’s one of Leonardo’s shirts; old enough to be sun-faded with a hole in the hem that Primo can poke his little finger through. When he pulls it over his head it smells of mothballs and soap, the faintest hint of familiar aftershave clinging to the threads.

_He thinks, suddenly, of a mottled wood table, lemons sun ripening on a windowsill, and the feel of fingers pressing into flesh as a needle had dragged through knife-torn skin. Leonardo’s father had hovered in the doorway while his son pulled the wound closed with shaking hands._

_Primo still has scar high on his right thigh where the old hunting blade had gone through, spun out from hands so similar to his own with unshakable accuracy even as slurred words spilled onto the floor. He’d understood, even then, why no one else had come to help._

_The blade had still been flecked with rusted blood the next spring, even as spring rain washed away the red pooling from the neck of a neighbour’s lamb._

The shirt is soft against his skin where it prickles with yesterday’s sweat. It pulls a little around his shoulders, where he’s already broader than half the men he knows, and Primo doesn’t think about what it might look like on him in a mirror. He wonders how soon Leonardo will ask for it back.

‘Primo,’ Leonardo says in the same quiet voice as before. The balls of Primo’s feet ache with the urge to run. 

Outside two men are shouting about a girl and Leonardo is staring at him with an expectant expression Primo can’t quite read and suddenly he can’t stay here any longer waiting for him to say whatever it is he clearly wants to.

‘You haven’t shaved,’ Leonardo says and when he touches a finger to the rough skin at the corner of Primo’s jaw it catches like the tip of a lighter burning into him.

\-- 

Primo tastes like cigarettes and brandy, gummy with sleep, when he kisses Leonardo, a hard determined thing that exists in the same second it dies. It isn’t so much a revelation as a slow unfolding of something Leonardo has always, vaguely, known.

‘ _Ok_ ,’ Primo hums to the air between them consideringly as he steps back, and Leonardo gets the sense he isn’t supposed to answer.

He wonders if he should feel different, somehow.

For a moment, as dust hangs under Rome sun – hazily golden in a heavy sepia way Leonardo isn’t used to – Primo blinks at him and looks like someone else entirely. There’s something lucid in his eyes where familiar wild fury should live, and it sets into Leonardo’s chest like a kind of rot.

 _‘Get out of here,’_ Leonardo wants to say. ' _If anyone could, you can.’_

Instead, he holds out a pack of crumpled cigarettes, old and a little damp, and Primo rolls his eyes but leans in close to catch the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (i was going to wait and post this once it was all written but, commitment without instant reward? in this economy? we don't know her. i will try to write faster than i post though so there shouldn't be a moment where i'm posting the last thing i've written)
> 
> i'm [ceraunos](https://ceraunos.tumblr.com/) on tumblr


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to [diggingdiggs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diggingdiggs/pseuds/diggingdiggs) and [dreamtiwasanarchitect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamtiwasanarchitect/pseuds/dreamtiwasanarchitect) for sense-reading the first chapter and this one!

**Calabria, 1959.**

_'Bring your mother’s ring,’_ is the only warning Leonardo gets, Salvatore’s voice distorted over even the short distance of the telephone line.

Like most things, he’s not sure why he thought it would happen any other way. But then again, you learn not to expect inevitable things, he supposes, living your life by proxy.

It’s been six months since the phone in the back bedroom of his house where his father used to sleep was installed. He’d watched the gaping hole opening up the wall older than the electricity being fed through it and known, with the same certainty he’d felt the day he’d received an acceptance letter for an accountancy school he’d never applied to, that whatever was coming was too far gone to be stopped.

The phone has only ever rung twice.

The first, a collect call over a that hardly feels as if it existed; the number from a phone box in Rome. The line had been so full of static he'd hardly heard a word, the call dropped before he'd said a word. He’d driven five hours through dawn anyway smoking his way through half a packet of crumpled cigarettes, a little old and a little damp, just to stay awake.

He’d driven the five hours back alone too, the taste of second-hand brandy on his lips enough to keep him awake for weeks afterwards. The realisation that Primo had already memorised the number comes later in a surprise that makes his jaw ache.

The second time the phone rings he almost misses it, already half in his car before he recognises that the shrill sound is coming from his own house. In the end it doesn’t take long to find the ring, like it’s been waiting for him. There’s a bullet in the box beside the band; something borrowed his mother had once said and Leonardo hadn’t understood what she’d meant. 

Sitting in Salvatore’s cousin’s draughty kitchen he slides the worn gold band onto the daughter’s finger with shaking fingers and thinks _our end is not our own_ with words that don’t belong to him, settling into place deep between his ribs and sitting like a stone in his throat. 

There’s something in her gaze, a set determination that uncurls in memory, familiar and foreign all at once, that reminds him of bruised knees and torn stockings, a vague childhood similarity.

The news spreads fast, caught on a snow-laced wind that drives down from the hills and under doors to dance between lips. They say she’s lucky, and he knows the way they look at him out of the corners of their eyes. He knows the way Primo looks at him too, like he’s starving on whatever cocktail he’s swallowed that night.

He’ll ask, years later after they’ve learnt each other so many times their skin is worn with the lines of each other’s lives, if she thought she was lucky, that day.

_‘You make your own luck in this life,’ she’ll say, and it’ll sound like an echo dancing through a tunnel until it becomes two voices, together and against each other all at once._

**Rome, 1959**

Primo is no stranger to the cold; he’s spent enough nights braced against late winter wind on the side of a mountain, his palms stung with only faint warmth against the soft belly of a mothering ewe, life coming too soon.

Someone sways into the centre of the bar, grabbing at Primo’s elbow to steady themselves, and points at the ceiling as if it’s open sky and gasps. The blue of the strip lights slides off their skin when they press fingertips into Primo’s jaw to slur, ‘snow, Primo,’ into his lips.

They kiss him with all the grace of two bottles of cheap wine and Primo swallows the taste of it, his hand in his own hair, until the music changes to something slower and the pulse of it drowns and dies. Someone has opened the door and the cool air that blows in tastes faintly of home, fresh and bitter as it tugs at his bones.

He stumbles out of the bar, pulling the thin leather of his jacket close, and watches as others follow, drifting out as if they’ve wandered into another world; it takes a moment for him to realise he’s the only one not seeing miracles in the dusting settling on the ground. Beside him a girl mutters dreamily that it looks like cocaine falling from heaven; it’s the kind of comparison only someone who’s never felt the drug in their blood would make, Primo thinks.

Perhaps that’s why, years later, sweating into grass already damp with evening dew, Primo will listen as Paul says, _‘shit man, my Granddad won’t even touch it to find out what the deal is, just has his mind made up already,’_ spinning it out like a story he doesn’t think Primo can understand.

Still, as he holds a palm out to catch an already melting flake between his fingers, the coolness of it fizzes against flushed skin and he supposes, if you hadn’t grown up with the seasons bedded so deep into your bones you can count years in the ice like rings in a tree, it could be something like a drug. 

Someone brings a piano out onto the street, the party spilling over into gutters. A bottle is pressed into Primo’s hand and in the other someone else slips a small white tab that tastes like chalk against his tongue. When he looks up at the sky again it glistens like diamonds refracted in moonlight and doesn’t seem so much like home. 

It’s not hard, after that, to let his limbs go loose enough to be caught by the wrist and pulled into a crack in the wall that opens itself up into someone’s staircase that becomes a wall, a bed, and stale breath whispering things he doesn’t hear as he gasps into a pillow he’ll forget by the morning.

He tucks the last of the night’s coke into a crack in the guy’s window before he leaves and buys himself a coffee with the roll of cash he slips from the lockbox under the sink.

 _‘With regards,’_ he thinks into the dregs and dodges a handful of snow hurled by a child.

The bus to Naples leaves somewhere between when Primo picks the lock to Stefano’s apartment and Stefano stops pointing the bread knife at his chest and sighs.

‘I thought you’d left,’ he breaths out as he hands Primo a slice of something thick and stale.

Primo shrugs, picking out the only soft part of the bread to roll between his tongue and his teeth. It tastes vaguely dusty; he supposes it could be worse.

‘You could buy better bread, _Accountant.’_

‘You know I’m not an accountant.’

‘Accountant, lawyer, it’s all the same in the end,’ Primo says and delights in the way Stefano shudders a little at the implication.

‘He’s called twice for you,’ Stefano says and even though they both know who he’s talking about he still adds:

‘Salvatore.’

He says _Salvatore_ like he’s only a passing acquaintance, someone he vaguely knows from another life, and Primo thinks ‘ _you don't say it but he’s still a part of your blood too. Running away doesn't make it any less true.’_

What he says instead is, ‘Leonardo is getting married.’

‘About time,’ Stefano says like he’s not particularly surprised and perhaps it’s bread after two days of only coffee and coke but the light in the room all at once feels too bright, like Primo can’t quite see through it.

There’s a postcard of Rome sent from a Calabria address creased inside of his jacket, the colosseum folded and dusty where it’d cut through a single line of powder, and Primo had imagined he could taste the ink as he inhaled. Standing in Stefano’s kitchen as the smoke from his cigarette twists through afternoon light the paper weight of it seems heavy, pulling unevenly at the fabric like something he’s forgotten to take it out.

‘Do you want to know what Salvatore wanted?’ Stefano asks, like if he tells Primo it’ll stop the phone ringing.

‘No,’ Primo smiles.

There’s a cigarette stand outside Stefano’s apartment that sells painted postcards of the colosseum, the ruins less crumbled than they really are. It’s only later, under the dim lights of someone else’s bedroom, that Primo realises he hasn’t bought a stamp. Perhaps he’ll go home next week anyway, he thinks, and swallows the taste of a stranger’s skin, brandy and cigarettes on their lips.


End file.
